NHLI hosts work experience students in our labs to inspire the next generation

The National Heart and Lung Institute hosted three Year 12 science students for a week of work experience across the department.

At the beginning of July NHLI welcomed three school students to its labs for a week of work experience. Reva, Intesar and Hassan are all interested in continuing their science studies to A Level and beyond, and spent the week getting a flavour of what life is like in a research environment.

We asked our budding scientists to tell us how they’d been spending their time with NHLI. Reva replied, "We’ve visited lots of areas of the department and spoken to researchers about the work that they do, as well as getting the chance to carry out experiments ourselves in the lab. Yesterday we were finding out about how bacteria in the heart is linked to different diseases – it was really interesting!".

On Thursday the students were looking at DNA concentration in the lab under the watchful eye of NHLI’s Dr Mike Cox (a research associate in Genomic medicine). Hassan explained, "We’re carefully measuring out 2 micrometre concentrations of DNA and then putting it in a spectrophotometer to check the DNA concentration. We’ve got to do a presentation about what we’ve been doing on Friday so we’ve also been thinking about how we can explain it and make it interesting for the other students".

The aim of the work experience programme is to inspire the students to continue with their science studies – so how did these students feel after a week at NHLI? Intesar commented, "I’m hoping to do medicine with pharmacology at university, and this week has made me really want to work hard at my A Levels so that I can go on to do this". Reva agreed, "Through this experience I’ve been able to see some of the jobs people do in science, and it’s made me feel like if I keep going with my science studies these are things that I could do too".

The National Heart and Lung Institute was pleased to get a chance to host these students as part of the work experience week.  Public engagement and the dissemination of our work to a wider audience, as well as unlocking the joys of science for future researchers is important to us as a Department.